Dubai: tourism and the end of public space
George Katodrytis School of Architecture & Design, American University of Sha rjah, U.A.E. Email:
[email protected]
Dubai: tourism and the end of public space
Abstract What is magnificent about photographers’ and filmmakers’ perceptions of the world is that they introduce a new state: infinite perceptions, insensible differences. The visual voyage through any contemporary cityscape operates like a continuous shift between eye and mind, as though differences no longer exist between the two. The city has definitely become a condition and a non-place. This is our foretaste of a unified urban condition. Rem Koolhaas notes, that the contemporary city is like the contemporary airport: “all the same”. On a similar note, Auge's condition of “supermodernity” and contention is that a growing proportion of space lacks meaning in the classic anthropological sense. This phenomenon is one of the three forms abundance characterizing what he terms the super modern condition: an abundance of space, an abundance of signs and an abundance of individualization. Yet the “new” global city, like a surreal machine, reproduces its own new identity. This is the moment to talk about the autopoeisis of architecture and its utopian capability: the increasing autonomy and its self-referential closure. The city has become an immense theme park, utopian, repeatedly reproduced as an in endless representation and fabricated in Photoshop. The paper will use the city of Dubai as a case study and looks the emergence of a new condition dependant on consumerism: on tourism and shopping and the end of public space. On one hand millions of tourists, like contemporary nomads flood the city only looking for familiarity: they want to feel at home in a strange place inhabiting constructed landscapes. On the other hand, the contemporary shopping mall can imitate anything and has become the only form of social space. This has lead to concentrated tourist infrastructures and mega-structure complexes (containing hotel + apartments + mall + cinema + expo + anything goes), which are clustered very close together. Dubai may be considered, among other new cities, as an emerging prototype for the 21st century: prosthetic and nomadic oases presented as isolated cities that extend out over the land and sea.
Keywords: Dubai, urbanism, tourism, shopping,
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Space – non-place – the generic condition Photoshop Urbanism - paste-up & thematic Constructed Leisure-land - tourism Shopping Malls Mystery with no history The paradox of the Prototype City – present /future
Space – non-place
“Dubai: The hippest city in the world” foxnews.com, October 26, 2005. In the last twenty years, Dubai has developed at a remarkable pace to the cosmopolitan global crossroads that it is today. Dubai thrives on newness and bigness, in an act of ongoing self-stylization and fantasy. Hence architecture is crucial, for it defines these elements. Little more than a grand-scale shopping mall, the city is comprised of 'mindzone' spaces, and of airport-like lobbies. In this theme park oriented cityscape, there is no differentiation between old and new. Everything is recent. Yet everything seems to point to the twin towers of consumerism and tourism. What used to be the ‘thrill’ of the urban voyage is quickly giving way to banality and exhaustion: one has nothing more to discover, nothing other than immense, general and non-descript spaces. The visual voyage through the city like in any contemporary cityscape operates like a continuous shift between eye and mind, as though differences no longer existed between the two. The city has definitely ceased to be a site: instead, it has become a condition. Perhaps the city has even lost its site: it tends to be everywhere and nowhere. Figure 1: Dubai’s contemporary cityscape
Rem Koolhaas, in his well-known essay “The Generic City” which was published in the Italian magazine Domus in 1994 contemplates the following observations, which pertain so well to Dubai: “1.1 Is the contemporary city like the contemporary airport – “all the same”? 1.6 It is big enough for everybody. It is easy. It does not need maintenance. If it gets too small it just expands. If it gets old it just self-destructs and renews. It is “superficial” – like Hollywood studio lot, it can produce a new identity every Monday morning. 6.3 The Street is dead. 9.2 The Generic City had a past, once? 10.2 The only activity is shopping… 11.5 Because the Generic City is largely Asian, its architecture is generally airconditioned. 11.8 The apparently solid substance of the Generic City is misleading. 51% of its volume consists of atrium.”
Photoshop Urbanism
Dubai is an extreme and complex example of urbanism. One of the fastest growing cities in the world today, it represents the epitome of sprawling, post-industrialist and car-
oriented urban culture and most of all real estate villages and spectacular enclaves. "Sixteen percent of all the building cranes in the world are in Dubai right now," Thompson said. "Sixteen percent. That's absolutely amazing for a city to have that kind of economic development." Foxnews.com, October 26, 2005. Within it, large numbers of transient populations are constantly in flux. Almost overnight, the city has become a juxtaposition of barren desert, 21st-century skyscrapers at extravagantly optimistic construction sites. The city is a large construction site, preparing itself for the incoming international nomads: new settlers, laborers, consultants and in-transit business travelers and tourists.
Figure 2: Dubai: Explosion of mega-scale cities
New building precincts and cities are planned as the existing fabric sprawls out to the arid region. The explosion of mega-scale structures and satellite cities provides opportunities for the study of new typologies of building programs and forms. Within the urban grid, and the monotonous and predictable urban condition, the generation of prosthetic geometries and new morphologies acts as a catalyst for innovation. Maybe this is the right time, in the evolution of 21st century architecture, to study and adopt new forms and technologies. The aura of optimism and the apparent financial success of the new building boom seem to require fresh, daring architects and designers. This urban mirage continues to spread out vertically and horizontally without any signs of slowing down; it takes in/purports a vertical urbanism - giant atriums and spidery passages among the towers – curiously set against a background of a sprawling “nothingness,” the desert. To the visitor, this cosmopolitan city might seem peculiar and hyperactive, with no layering or apparent hierarchy. Its allure lies in its ability to adjust rapidly, in its complexity, in its contradictions. The city of Dubai represents the truly generic condition of the contemporary city. These are places where history has been almost completely blotted out, where the terrain has become completely artificial, where the urban tissues do not hold together beyond a relatively short time. This type of generic city amounts to no more than the coexistence of a number of apparently unconnected buildings that, by virtue of proximity, happen to form an urban condition. A new phenomenon that takes place without architecture, without extraordinary architects… Perhaps the nearest analogy to the mode of production of this new type of city is Photoshop, which creates collages of photographs and other digitized images, combining and layering anything with anything, as though in an accumulation of objects of desire. In this type of city, the notions of center and periphery have lost their validity. What is more, it seems as though the city has lost its site, for it tends to be everywhere and nowhere. This fragmented and collaged city, which is perpetually being made and remade “a la carte,” is really a replica.
Figure 3: Study of commercial spaces Figure 4: Dubai’s islands
The city tends to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time, because it has no urban center or core. Dubai thrives on newness and bigness, in an act of ongoing self-stylization and fantasy. Hence architecture is crucial, for it defines these elements. Little more than a grand-scale “shopping mall,” the city is comprised of “mind-zone” spaces, and of airportlike lobbies. In this “Theme Park"-orientated cityscape, there is no differentiation between old and new. Everything is recent. Yet everything seems to point to the twin towers of consumerism and tourism. The city has lost its meaning but not its search to be spectacular, the impressive display of staged buildings and iconic complexes. Here, architecture and interiors act as interfaces to consumerism, to the act of purchasing, to the ephemeral experience. Interior shopping spaces are ever larger, more luxurious and seductive. The advent of airconditioning liberated the architectural form and gave rise to a new set of formal possibilities. Figure 5: Dubai’s street bazaar
Dubai is a prototype of the new post-global city, which creates appetites rather than solves problems. It is represented as consumable, replaceable, disposable and short-lived. Dubai is addicted to the promise of the new: it gives rise to an ephemeral quality, a culture of the “instantaneous.” Relying on strong media campaigns, new “satellite cities” and mega-projects are planned and announced almost weekly. This approach to building is focused exclusively on marketing and selling. Constructed Leisure-land
Flying over Dubai, one may easily be confronted with a huge urban condition: a 21st century and new diagrammatic urbanism, both as carpets over the land and as prosthetic islands along the seashore. As a tourist, there is no need to travel to distant destinations, to desolated islands. Islands are now close to shore, in a new typology of hydro-suburbia. The island is the lowest form of spatial organization. Pu re accumulation, it has an iconic form and a certain perimeter and location. It can be reached by dramatic arriving (compare here with Venice’s Lido and Florida’s Key West). The surface of the island reveals everything there is, all contents; islands are fund amentally consistent and predictable: they give an assurance of security. But they have potentials; they are exclusive; they attract investors and tourists and they can sell. These are exotic islands, the most media frenzied and newsiest islands in the wo rld, isolated and made to stage the grotesque, at a large scale that looks like no other architecture. This exceptionality accords well with the mechanics of mass tourism. Once cities relied on a specific confluence of raw materials, transportation routes, and labor to generate
industrial revenue; now cities rely on a different con fluence of architectural fantasy, slightly different transportation routes, and tourists to generate entertainment revenues. As Briavel Holcomb points out in his essay “Marketing Cities for Tourism” (1999), in the tourist realm “it is the consumer, not the product that moves. Because the product is usually sold before the consumer sees it, the marking of tourism is intrinsically more significant than the conventional case where the product can be see, tested, and compared to similar products in situ. It means that the representation of place, the images created for marketing, the vivid videos and persuasive prose of advertising texts, can be as selective and creative as the marketer can make them – a reality check comes only after arrival”. Increasingly, the kind of contemporary architecture tha t simulates mass tourism has to be not only photogenic but also telegenic – buildings that look striking in a sequence of rapid-fire cuts or that stand out in a static shot behind the pretty features of a talking h ead. Many buildings of this sort end up as backdrops. The city sprawls out like an exponent of an algorithmically evolving pattern: a Fractal Architecture with forms of increased perimeter and endless topological variations, but remains as a 2-dimensional pattern, allowing very little for 3-dimensional variety. But in an over-organized world - a groaning, decrepit universe of systems - the shapeless and the worthless have no value, a new allure. The diagram is free from constraints, from selection, from the tyranny of style. Motivated by a desire for authentic experience of for exotic places, for escape or spectacle, or simply by an urge for new knowledge, the tourist leaves a familiar environment to view other locations. Today, as places increasingly get restructured as spaces of consumption, and as tourist activities merge with other mass-consumption practices, from shopping and sports to culture an d education, architecture is becoming an integral part of the conception and economy of tourism, and vice versa. Dubai’s recent development has put it on the map of iconic projects, of real estate prospecting and holiday dream destinations. Yet what is missing is the visionary realization of its architecture. Figure 6: Dubai’s new cityscape
Historically, the origin of modern vacation time can be traced back to the 1930s, when workers in France, for the first time, were given the right to twelve paid vacation days. Today, tourism has become a “total lifestyle experience.” Figure 7: Dubai as the “destination city”
The modern tourist resort is by definition a constructed one. The tourist’s perception seems to have shifted away from the pictorial 18 th century: there is no longer the desire for the panoramic view. The excessively visual contemporary culture has made
everything look familiar. Contemporary tourists are looking for familiarity: they want to feel at home in a strange place. This has led to concentrated tourist infrastructures and mega-structure complexes (containing hotel + apartments + mall + cinema + expo + anything goes), which are clustered very close together. In this sense, architecture and landscape are part of a single system, characterized by stratification and controlled spatial experience. Dean MacCannell comments on the autonomy of the tourist world. The tourist trail open s up a new set of sensory experiences. Potentially, the itinerary is wide open and adventures lurk around every corner. Ideally, the sheer weight of the unknown results in a full-blown sensory encounter with all aspects of passing built environment. Travel of this sort starts to sound like the voyage of the Surrealists into the city as dreamscape, or the concept of the derive, popularized by Guy Debord and the Situationists, a journey into changing urban ambiances and their new psychic atmospheres. It becomes not only an aesthetic pleasure but also an act of liberation. While travel does resemble this description for some of us some of the time, an overwhelming density of the unknown can also shut down our senses. It is hard to revel in a streetscape at midnight when one is desperately trying to find a hotel with a vacancy.. For these reasons, many of us prefer to reduce the quantity of the unknown by booking advance transportation, lodging, and even sightseeing excursions. Mass tourism cushions the impact of arrival and enables the visitor to negotiate larger and potentially confusing stretches of territory. In mass tourism, a dose of familiarization is required. Whereas it was onc e uncommon to shop for ordinary clothing items while on vacation, brand-name stores and outlets mall have popped up all over the world. One buys not only souvenir but also personal and household items, the identical kinds of shorts or running shoes available back home. Similarly, with the spread of franchised restaurants and hotels, it is possible to eat and sleep in circumstances that are remarkably alike, and tune into CNN almost everywhere. Mass tourism is indeed like mass media. The lure of the new works best when the new is both anticipated and well packaged. In 1925, in his essay “travel and dance”, Siegfried Kracauer already remarked that tourists are prepared for foreign places though the perusal of illustrated magazines. Nowadays, though coffee-table books, friends’ JPEGs, television ads, and movie trailers, tourists are well prepped for on -site architectural experiences. A profusion of tour guides, and especially Internet sites, launches the tourist into touring weeks or months before the actual trip begins. What is striking about this body of preparatory information is the degree to which issues of touring comfort and efficiency take precedence over historical information about architecture or place. From the airport to the air-conditioned bus to the four- or five-star hotel, package tourists spend much of their time within a cocoon. They might as well be at home, or at the mall. The orchestrated itineraries, with their chosen spots for lecturing, picture taking and shopping, and their frequent driving ellipses over ignorable terrain are similar to the experience of movies and television.
In Dubai there is little difference between holiday accommodation and housing. Architectural programs are becoming fused and undifferentiated. The morphology of the landscape and seascape is becoming fabricated to the point that it may soon be difficult to differentiate between the natural and the constructed. Dubai’s natural beachfront is 45km long. Artificial islands will add another 1,500km of beachfront, turning the coastline and the city into an inexhaustible holiday resort. This constructed landscape, like a stage set, provides edited scenes of adventure and entertainment. No matter in which part of the world, whenever architecture is built from a tabula rasa –it seems to show a penchant for a universal language of spectacle and the exoticism of the new. It therefore might be useful top draw on another understanding of the exotic at this point, and ask in what ways specific examples of architecture are elusive and other to the city itself. This is also a way of asking how the exotic intervenes in the cultural politics of global tourism. To explore this further, one may look at some cities in particular –Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai – all popular tourist destinations that have been transformed by new architecture. This is something that every tourist notices, in fact, cannot help noticing, because new buildings are everywhere; so that whether or not architecture as intended destination for tourism, it becomes a focal point. Most tourists soon notice that there is something not quite right about these new buildings that appear to try hard to look modern and in effect nondescript; there are either details missing, or too many extraneous details, usually in the form of additions that attempt to assert a “Chinese” identity for some, and an “Arabic” for Dubai – a form of exoticism. Jean Baudrillard has analyzed contemporary culture though the figure of Disneyland, thereby inserting a form of simulated architecture and tourism into the heart of his definition of hyper-reality. Disneyland is presented as an imaginary kingdom, set aside from the values of everyday. As such, it serves as a “prop” to make us believe that the world outside is “real.” For Baudrillard, however, the world outside is not “real” but “hyper-real,” and Disneyland is no different from that world. The logic of role-playing is and theming is not limited to Disneyland. It has permeated the whole of the Western society. Everyday life is colonized by fantasy. It is dominated by escapist dreaming. Both the “authentic” architectural icons, and the simulated architectural icons, such as Disneyland or Las Vegas, are inscribed within the same logic of escapist dreaming. Escapism is an ambivalent, even negative word when juxtaposed against realism or authenticity. Yet insofar as we are sensate beings, we are inescapably escapists. All animals escape when confronted by some sort of threat, when they are pushed. Human are no different. What makes us different is that we are only pushed, but also pulled by some preferred, imagined reality that is either already I ex istence, “out there,” to be discovered, or is a possibility to be realized –that is, constructed. We escape from the given to the desirable: theme parks, shopping malls, and the suburban developments. Shopping malls have often been excoriated as a fantasy world of easy fulfillments.
Shopping Malls
To the visitor, Dubai might seem peculiar. It lacks historical identity: few traditional buildings exist, and most of those are reconstructions. There is no core, no clear urban evolution or hierarchy. Yet, this hyperactive city thrives in an unprecedented optimism. The prospect of the “new,” high-quality life makes Dubai an addictive place, where all points to one thing: consumerism. Urbanism and Architecture act as interfaces to trading, purchasing, and deal-making. Not unlike the typical American suburbia, Dubai is experienced by car. Its hot and humid climate, especially during the summer months, makes it almost impossible to engage in outdoor activities. Air-conditioned mega-malls are the evening boulevards that draw crowds of all nationalities. Shopping is arguably the last remaining form of public activity, replacing almost every aspect of urban life. Even airports have become wildly profitable by converting travelers into consumers. Air conditioning transformed almost all interior spaces to retail spaces, by providing the visitor/consumer with the necessary comfort. The escalator provided the shopper with a means of effortlessly traversing the rapidly expanding distances, of scaling the heights of commercial environments. Even nature has been systematically reinvented, so that it can survive within the increasing artificiality of these new endless interiors. The artificial is seen as a more desirable alternative to the natural. A description from 1938 of a windowless store describes a retail space “free from the slightest daylight or natural ventilation, thereby eliminating dust and at the same time creating better, airwashed, mechanical ventilation and more uniform, pleasing artificial lighting results […] In many ways the elimination of windows adds to the beauty and to the selling efficiency of the store”. In the mid-1950s, the relationship between air conditioning and shopping is consummated in the “invention” of the shopping mall. Unlike the department store, the mall is the first retail type to exist because of air conditioning. Shopping could never have become effortless without air conditioning. Only air conditioning can make windowless sealed interiorized and artificial environments feel natural and comfortable. Along with the escalator, engineered climates have enabled an explosion in the size of interior space, creating environments that are becoming increasingly divorced from the outside, and able to accommodate any range of human activity in almost any combination. By making interior spaces more large and comfortable, it has become increasingly difficult to escape them. By combining activities that used to be dispersed in a single space, air conditioning radically altered the way that time is spent in public. Shopping time was never as prolonged as it is now. Department stores and shopping centers began their steady encroachment on public activity by capitalizing upon comfort.
Therefore, by increasing the amount of time spent indoors, in comfort, the possibility of spending is increased. The liberation of the architectural form, from what used to be solely an environmental shelter, has provided a set of new possibilities. Architectural form can now take any configuration. It can address human issues not only of comfort, but also of social contact. It is difficult to conceive of Postmodernism without referring to structuralism, and poststructuralism in particular. Post-modern cities are caught up in the rapid changes brought on by globalization. The need for a new interface is seen as a departure from the paradigms of modernism. Already the cities are becoming profoundly heterogeneous and non-linear. Mystery with no history
Dubai began life as a small port and collection of barasti (palm frond) houses clustered around the Creek. Unendowed with abundant fertile land, early 20th century settlers set about making their living from the sea, concentrating on fishing, pearling and trading. Commercial success coupled with the liberal attitudes of its rulers made the emirate attractive to traders from India and Iran, who began to settle in the growing town. This gave the city an early start before the explosion of wealth brought on by oil production in the late 1960s. The trajectory of the development of Dubai is reflected in its population, which has grown fifteen-fold since 1969: from 60,000 then to well over one million today. It is projected that, by 2010, Dubai’s tourist trade will accommodate around fifteen million tourists per annum, serviced by more than 400 hotels. Comparisons are telling: in 2002, Egypt, for example, had 4.7 million visitors, and Dubai 4.2 million. (The former, of course, hosts ‘real history’, against the latter’s Las Vegas version – including, in the next few years, the construction of a set of Pyramids in the vast theme park Dubailand.) The emirate’s expansion has followed the Los Angeles model: new developments sprout in the desert, beyond the older cores of Deira and Bur Dubai, linked by freeways and ring roads. The open spaces left in between are gradually filled with a lower-intensity, cardependent form of urban sprawl. Figure 8: Dubai’s Waterfront development Figure 9: Dubai: Fractal Architecture
Since Dubai has no real urban history, it has had to invent a variety of new urban conditions. Using its transitory oil wealth, the emirate has built "free zone" areas, promoted as clusters defined by economic liberalization, technological innovation, and political transparency. Jebel Ali Free Zone, an industrial and trading hub, was followed in the late 1990s by three sprawling industrial parks: Internet City, a bid to make Dubai the Arab world's IT hub; Media City, which aspires to replace Cairo as the Middle East's media capital while broadcasting the emirate's vision of openness; and Dubai
International Financial Center (DIFC), a stock market headquarters meant to match those of Hong Kong, London and New York. While the desert is usually considered barren and worthless, Dubai’s “empty quarter” has unique real estate value, thanks largely to two companies: Emaar Properties (founded 1997) and government-owned Nakheel. Among many residential projects, Emaar is currently developing the 3.5km-long Dubai Marina behind the existing Jumeirah beachfront hotels. A high-rise city-within-a-city and home to more than 40,000 residents, it is set to become the focus of the New Dubai. Nakheel has become synonymous with The Palm, Jumeirah, a 5km-long, reclaimed island. Other Palms and islands are currently being ”planted,” in the massive undertaking of transplanting the desert into the sea. The latest project, Dubai Waterfront, will not only add 375km of new beachfront but will include the largest man-made canal carved out of the desert. By 2002, when freehold property rights were established in Dubai, allowing foreigners to buy property for the first time, the stage had been set for a real estate boom. Dubai is turning into a huge business-meet-leisure park. In the desert, “Dubailand” is being built – a $19bn theme park twice the size of Disneyworld in Florida. The plan also involves the creation of Dubai as a city for 10m people, compared with the current population of 1.5m. Its free enterprise zone is booming , as is its stock exchange (up 1,200% in two and a half years with stocks valued at $253bn). The amount of money raised from initial public offerings will have hit $15bn in th e past 12 months. Hundreds of luxury hotels are being built and many hundreds of thousands of flats and luxury homes aimed at housing the rich, the retired and the tourists as well as the immigrant workers tasked with making his dream reality. The paradox of the Prototype City
If Rome was the “Eternal City” and New York’s Manhattan the apotheosis of 20 th century congested urbanism, then Dubai may be considered the emerging prototype for the 21st century: prosthetic and nomadic oases presented as isolated cities that extend out over the land and the sea. Figure 10: Dubai’s vision of it’s future
Yet, while Dubai is perhaps becoming architecturally the ultimate fantasy city, it has not provided many opportunities to innovative architects. Most of the new projects do not push the boundaries of design innovation. They stay within a safe range of design styles that are palatable to the masses. This is the story of the 21 st century new metropolis: generic, mega-city, impressive but not original and above all: consumable. References
Koolhaas, Rem, (1994) “The Generic City”, essay, Domus Magazine
Bijlsma, Like, (2004)“Editorial: Architecture and the Tourist Landscape”, OASE#64, NAi Publications, Rotterdam Davis, Mike, (2005) “Sinister Paradise: Does the Road to the Future End at Dubai?”, essay, www.omdispatch.com Augé, Marc, " Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity", Verso.
